Trump posted at 7:24 Thursday morning that he wants no new rules for super-intelligent AI. His words: "I want to leave it exactly where it is. That is China's position also. Our guardrail is the DOJ!" Xi Jinping arrived at the White House three hours later. He said the opposite. The two countries, Xi said, have "both the capability and responsibility" to manage AI "for good" and to keep it "always under human control."
Xi has said the same thing for months. In July he told an AI conference in Shanghai that China needs laws, monitoring and emergency brakes for AI. On Saturday 12 September his state security minister, Chen Yixin, wrote that China needs "special laws and regulations" for AI. The next day Beijing published a new set of AI safety rules.
Here is what those rules are for. Chen named the enemy: "hostile forces" using deepfakes and "intelligent online trolls" to wage "a propaganda war and a cognitive war against us." Xi writes AI rules to protect his party at home. He does not want rules that slow China down. When Anthropic's Dario Amodei asked both countries to slow the race, Xi's foreign ministry called it "fear-mongering." That was Monday 14 September.
So Trump got Xi half right. Xi will not slow the race. But Xi wants rules, and Trump wants none. Trump's guardrail is the Justice Department, after the damage is done.
Below the wall: the one AI deal on the table, and what Xi brought with the pandas.
